[breakem]

Your scenario makes sense to me. One landfall to the next instead of straight across would have been much easier.

I'm trying to remember where I read that Columbus knew from old sailors that the earth was round and that he could reach land by sailing west. It also said that most educated people at the time believed it also.

[Mr Rogers]

In an astronomy class, I was taught that the greeks knew the earth was round and had estimated the distance as roughly 25,000 miles (using, of course, whatever units were common to Greeks before Jesus was born).

I was told educated europeans knew this, and they had no interest in sailing west because it was the long way around, and no one knew if there was any land in between.